The timing of speech-planning in turn-taking

In a project I carried out with Antje Meyer we developed a dual-task setting involving turn-taking and finger-tapping to investigate when people initiate speech planning in turn taking situations. We found that, when possible, listeners actually wait as long as they can before initiating the cognitively demanding aspects of speech planning, while maintaining the goal of only a small gap between turns. We think that speakers do this with the goal of reducing interference between speech production planning and speech comprehension. see publication here